Mamdani’s First City-Owned Grocery To Open at Former Juvenile Jail Site as $70 Million Funding Fight Awaits

The first of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores is set to open on the site of a former juvenile detention center turned affordable housing development in Hunts Point sometime in 2027 — well before the first of his proposed grocery stores in Upper Manhattan, the Democratic Socialist announced Monday. Mr. Mamdani said the 20,000 square-foot store — to be opened at The Peninsula, a new property development at the former site of the Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility in Hunts Point — will help solve an affordability crisis that he has blamed on corporate supermarkets. He believes opening grocery stores on city-owned property will “reduce overhead costs that are currently passed on to consumers.”While Hunts Point was the second city-owned grocery concept unveiled by Mr. Mamdani, it will open before another grocery at La Marqueta, a city-owned marketplace in East Harlem, that he announced in April. City Hall would first need to secure funding for all five of the mayor’s proposed groceries from the New York City Council, which Mr. Mamdani estimates will cost $70 million to complete. The city-owned grocery at La Marqueta is expected to cost taxpayers roughly $30 million and is scheduled to open sometime in 2029. He intends to open one store in each of the city’s five boroughs by the end of his first term in 2029.“Working families in the Bronx have been forced to pay the price for a city that keeps getting more expensive while government looks the other way. That has to change,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. The Peninsula is a multiyear redevelopment project spearheaded by the New York City Economic Development Corporation that will transform the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, which closed down in 2011, into a mixed-use development featuring affordable housing, early childhood education, and open space. City Council Speaker Julie Menin, a Democrat, has been noncommittal about Mr. Mamdani’s plans, citing her concerns about their potential impact on small businesses and local grocers. Writing in Vital City, economist and author of “Understandable Economics” Howard Yaruss, said Mr. Mamdani’s grocery stores will “undercut” the independently owned businesses and mom and pop stores that the Mayor himself has championed. “These subsidies and expenses, which will undermine existing taxpaying businesses, raise the question of whether this program makes sense at a time when the city is facing multibillion-dollar deficits,” Mr. Yaruss wrote.He added, “If the goal is to address hunger, this is a particularly inefficient way of doing it.”

Mamdani’s First City-Owned Grocery To Open at Former Juvenile Jail Site as $70 Million Funding Fight Awaits

Mamdani’s First City-Owned Grocery To Open at Former Juvenile Jail Site as $70 Million Funding Fight Awaits

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